***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2017 M. A. Lawson Simpson pulled the U-Haul into a loading zone in front of the building on K Street. Otis nodded to Simpson--You know what to do--got out of the cab, and walked back to open the cargo door of the truck. Otis was a little nervous about Simpson because he didn't know him all that well. When his previous wheelman, Connors, had been diagnosed with cancer, he'd recommended that Simpson replace him, and the one other time Otis had used him, he'd done okay. He didn't run his mouth, he stayed calm, and he followed orders without asking dumb questions so he fit in with the rest of Otis's crew and should do all right today. All he had to do was drive; he wasn't going to be involved in the heavy shit. What Otis was really worried about was that he hadn't been given enough time to plan the heist. In the back of the UHaul were the three men Otis always worked with: Brown, McCabe, and Quinn. He had been lucky to get them all on such short notice. He knew none of them would be on another job because they'd each cleared almost fifty grand in Raleigh three months ago. He was also the only guy they ever worked with. Still, he'd been worried that one of them might have decided to take a vacation, particularly Brown, who liked to go on cruises with his sister. The idea of Brown and his loopy sister dining with the squares on a cruise ship always made Otis smile. But they'd all been at home or near their homes when he called. He wanted all the manpower he could get. The U-Haul had a hydraulic lift platform, which was the only rea- son Otis was using it. He didn't know how much the safe weighed and he didn't want to try to manhandle four or five hundred pounds into the back of a van. Brown placed a big toolbox on a hydraulic dolly rated for two thou- sand pounds and rolled it onto the platform, and Otis lowered the plat- form with Brown standing on it. The toolbox was aluminum, four feet long, two feet wide, and two feet deep. It held a lot of equipment and it was heavy. Quinn and McCabe jumped to the ground; Brown reached back into the truck and grabbed a large black gym bag and placed it on top of the toolbox. Then they proceeded toward the entrance. They were all wearing thin leather gloves, blue coveralls, and blue baseball caps. The coveralls were all size XL, except Brown's, which were XXL. They were also wearing sunglasses and fake mustaches. Otis had bought the mustaches for a racetrack job he'd planned two years ago, but decided to drop when they changed security procedures at the track. It was seven p.m. and still light outside, so the sunglasses weren't totally out of line, but four big guys, identically dressed, with sun- glasses and big bushy mustaches. . . . Hell, they looked like criminals. Otis could only hope that if there were cameras on the street, their features wouldn't be recognizable. If the guy wasn't paying them so damn much--Otis had never made this much on a single job in his life--he never would have agreed to do it. Otis entered the building first, placing his right hand over the lower part of his face so only his sunglasses were visible. He glanced quickly around the lobby for surveillance cameras and didn't see any. He signaled at the three men waiting outside, and they entered the building. Fortunately, there was no one in the lobby, which was what Otis had been hoping for. Otis pushed the button for the elevator and one of the three elevator doors opened immediately. Otis entered first, again keeping his hand over the lower part of his face. There wasn't a camera in the elevator, at least not that he could see. He noticed, as he always did, that the elevator had been manufactured by a company named Otis. As soon as his crew was inside and the doors were shut, Otis said, "Masks." They all took off the ball caps and the sunglasses and shoved them into the right rear pocket of their coveralls. From another pocket, they pulled out black ski masks and pulled them down over their heads. Otis pushed the button for the seventh floor. As the elevator was ascending, Otis said, "Guns." Brown unzipped the black gym bag that was sitting on the toolbox, and Quinn and McCabe each removed MAC-10 machine pistols. Otis and Brown took out 9 mm S&Ws. All the weapons had sound suppressors. Brown shoved his pistol into a pocket since he couldn't hold it and push the dolly at the same time. They walked down the hall to room 711. Beside the door was a small brass plaque that read THE CALLAHAN GROUP; above the door Otis could see a surveillance camera looking down at him. There was nothing they could do about the camera except move quickly. He turned the doorknob but the door was locked. "Take it out," he said to Brown. Brown removed the door-knocker from the tool box: a four-foot- long, four-inch-diameter piece of carbon steel pipe with two handles welded onto it. The pipe had come from Brown's garage and he'd welded the handles on himself two hours ago. They were all big men--all over six feet tall and strong--but Brown was a monster: six-foot-six, over two hundred and fifty pounds. He swung the door-knocker, hitting the door just above the knob, and blew it open. They found themselves inside a small foyer, and behind an empty desk was another door. Otis turned the knob on the second door but it was also locked. "Shit," he said, and motioned at Brown and Brown stepped forward with the door-knocker. Gotta move, gotta move , Otis was thinking. Normally David Norton would have left the office at six but he was waiting for a call from Osaka, Japan, where it was eight a.m. It was a beautiful July evening, the temperature in the upper seventies. D.C. had been experiencing a brutal heat wave, but it finally broke and it was actually pleasant outside. Had he not been waiting for the Japanese lawyer to call, he would have been sitting on his deck at home, having a glass of wine. If he was lucky, he'd be sitting on the deck alone. If he wasn't so lucky, his wife would be having a drink with him, bitching about the seventh grade morons she taught. Jesus! What was that noise? Something had crashed into something. Then he heard the same sound, but closer this time. Maybe a bookcase in one of the offices had fallen over. He got up, went around his desk, and opened his door to investigate. What the hell? There were four guys coming down the hall toward him, pushing a dolly with a big metal box on it. It took a second for him to realize the guys were wearing ski masks, and about a millisecond later, he thought, Oh shit, they've got guns--which was the last thought David Norton ever had. Quinn didn't hesitate. As soon as the short, bald guy stepped into the hallway, he raised the MAC-10 and squeezed the trigger. A three- round burst. All three bullets hit the bald guy in the chest. Phil Klein was an accountant; he'd been one all his life and, without a doubt, this was the most interesting job he'd ever had. He just hoped that he didn't end up in jail one day. His job was to create a completely fictitious financial life for the Callahan Group. A small part of the income received by the Group was legitimate. A large part of the Group's income, however, came from mysterious sources--at least they were mysterious to Klein--and he created a financial portrait of a company that, at least to the IRS, appeared to be very successful. And this was what made the job so unique. Normally what companies tried to do was juggle the numbers to make a company look less successful, like it had experienced enormous losses and had so many expenses that there was no profit to pay taxes on. But that's not what Callahan wanted. He wanted Klein to make it appear as if the Callahan Group was one of the more successful lobbying firms on K Street. Callahan had also told Klein to never try to slip one past the IRS--which, as a tax accountant, went against Klein's nature. Callahan said he wanted Klein to do absolutely nothing that might trigger an IRS audit. Like David Norton, Phil Klein's brain couldn't immediately comprehend what his ears were hearing. The first thing he thought of was the time his eighteen-year-old daughter ran her Mazda into the garage door. Then he heard the sound again. He got up from his desk and flexed his right knee, which always locked up when he sat too long, and heard the spitting sounds, three quick pffts. And like Norton, Klein opened his door to investigate. The first thing he saw, across the hall from him, was Norton, on his back, his white shirt looking as if he'd spilled cranberry juice down the front. He looked down the hallway and saw men in ski masks coming rapidly toward him. Two of the men were holding what looked like a machine guns. Klein jumped back into his office just as one of the men fired half a dozen shots at him--and he realized the spitting sounds he'd heard were bullets being fired from a silenced weapon, a sound he'd only heard in movies. The bullets made groves in the wall outside his office and dug chunks of wood out of the doorframe. He slammed the door shut, locked it, and ran for the phone. "Get him," Otis said, "before he calls the cops." Quinn ran down the hall to the office of the man who had just stuck his head out. He tried the doorknob, but it was locked. He stepped back and fired six shots directly through the door--the .45 caliber bullets tore through the door like it was crepe paper--then motioned for Brown, and Brown swung the door-knocker and the door flew open. Quinn entered the room prepared to shoot again but saw the man lying behind his desk. At least three of the bullets he'd fired through the door had hit the guy. He appeared to be dead but Quinn's orders were to make sure, so he fired a round into the man's head. Quinn figured if the guy wasn't dead now, he was fucking immortal. Thomas Callahan not only heard the doors being bashed open, but could actually see what was happening because there was a security camera above the door to his office pointing down the hallway. Callahan's door was always kept locked, and he would check to see who was in the hall before he admitted anyone. The security camera fed directly into a small monitor on his desk. So he could see the men coming; he saw one of them kill Norton; he saw the same man fire half a dozen rounds at Klein. Klein was most likely dead now, too, and Callahan figured that he was going to be dead himself in the next couple of minutes. The first thing he did was take the document he'd been given by Sally Ann Danzinger and put it in his safe. Seven hours earlier, she had given him a sealed envelope and told him to place it in his safe, unopened. And Callahan did. But after Danzinger left, and when he could no longer control his curiosity, he'd removed the envelope and opened it. Inside he found a document that meant absolutely nothing to him: It was a single short paragraph that was just numbers and symbols. So he put it into a new white envelope and sealed it, but when his people started getting killed, the envelope was still on his desk. His safe was open and he ran to it, tossed the envelope inside, slammed the door shut, and spun the combination dial to lock the safe. The only other thing inside the safe was fifty grand in cash--petty cash he kept on hand for emergencies. He was religious about destroying paperwork after missions were completed, so there wasn't anything else in his office that might reveal the true nature of The Callahan Group. He had no idea, however, who the masked men were or why they were there. Callahan had done things over the years that could cause several entities--foreign and domestic--to want him dead, but there wasn't anything he'd done lately that seemed a likely cause for what was happening. He couldn't help but wonder if his people were dying because of the document Sally Ann Danzinger had given him. Callahan glanced at the monitor on his desk and could see that all four men were now outside his office. He opened the center drawer of his desk and took out an old .45 that he'd been given when he was a lieutenant in the army, over thirty years ago. He was supposed to have given the gun back when he gave up his commission and returned to civilian life, but he lied and said it had been stolen. The army didn't believe him, of course, but what they could do? Callahan couldn't remember the last time he'd fired the .45. When he first joined the CIA, right after he got out of the army, there'd been a few years where he'd been required to qualify with a sidearm, but that had been almost twenty years ago. And that was probably the last time he'd fired the weapon. He wondered if the bullets were still good. Probably. Bullets didn't spoil like milk, he hoped. Callahan figured he would be able to kill at least one of them before they killed him. If he got lucky, he might be able to get two. He smiled. There were a lot of ways a man could leave this earth, and considering his lifestyle--he smoked, he drank too much, he was overweight--he'd always figured that he'd be attacked by his own overworked heart. Dying with a gun in his hand wasn't the worst way to go; he just wished he knew why he was going to die. He took up a position on the right side of his door. A second later, the door blew open and a big guy followed the door-knocker partway through the door and into his office--and Callahan shot him in the head. He started to shoot again but one of the guys with a MAC-10 let out a burst, shooting right through the wall where he was standing next to the doorframe. Drywall and paint couldn't stop the bullets. He wasn't sure how many times he was hit--he knew he'd been hit at least once but he didn't feel any pain. He staggered backward, almost falling, just as a man stepped into his office holding a pistol. Callahan raised his hand to shoot the guy, but he was too slow. "Goddamnit," Otis said softly, looking down at Brown's body. He'd known Brown for almost twenty years. He'd been one of his best friends, and Otis didn't have that many friends. And Brown's sister . . . She was going to fall apart when she learned her brother had been killed. He'd never expected, in a damn office building, that anyone would have a weapon. Otis looked over at the man he'd shot: an overweight, gray-haired guy in his sixties. Otis had hit him once in the chest and he could see blood oozing out of another wound in his side where Quinn had shot him. He didn't seem to be breathing. Otis pulled the picture he'd been given from a pocket and looked at it. Yeah, the guy was Callahan and there was the safe in the wall, just like he'd been told. He hadn't planned to kill Callahan right away; he'd been planning to force him to open his safe so he wouldn't have to steal it--but now that wasn't going to happen. The big, loud .45 that Callahan had used to kill Brown was on the floor near Callahan's right hand. Otis kicked the gun away. He turned and said to Quinn, "Make sure nobody else is here. Take the door- knocker in case the offices are locked." Quinn nodded and picked up the door-knocker, which Brown was still clutching in one dead hand. "Get the safe out of the wall," Otis said to McCabe. McCabe was looking down at Brown, holding his MAC-10 down by the side of his leg. "Jesus, I can't believe he got Ray," McCabe said. "Goddamnit! Get moving!" Otis said. McCabe pulled Brown's body out of the doorway and pushed the dolly and toolbox into the office. He opened the box and removed a battery-powered DeWalt Sawsall--and attacked the wall surrounding the safe. The Sawsall had blades that could cut through metal, and he'd brought plenty of extra blades. In the toolbox was also a portable acetylene torch kit and a canister of gas, which meant that McCabe would be able to cut through any metal he couldn't saw through. Otis really hoped they didn't have to use the torch because then he'd have to figure out how to disable the smoke detectors. Unless there were other people on this floor, Otis wasn't too wor- ried about anyone calling the cops. They'd used weapons with silencers and the round Callahan had fired had been loud, but he'd only fired once. He figured that if there were still people in the building on the floors above and below them, they might have heard the shot but when they only heard one, they would have dismissed it as some sort of urban anomaly. Otis couldn't help but think that he'd been a fool to take the job, no matter how much the damn guy was paying them. He never, ever worked this way: with no planning, no reconnaissance. And now Brownwas dead and he had no idea how long it was going to take McCabe to chop the safe out of the wall. Otis had one cardinal rule, a rule he'd lived by since he was seven- teen: Don't let greed get you jailed or killed--and he'd broken his own rule. While the Sawsall was chewing through the wood and aluminum frame holding the safe into the wall, Otis opened the bag that had con- tained the weapons and started dumping everything on Callahan's desk into it. He'd been told to take all the paper in the office, as well as any computers, flash drives, or disks. Quinn was back. "There's nobody else here," he said." Get his phone," Otis said to Quinn, pointing at Callahan. He could see the phone on Callahan's belt, an old-fashioned clamshell phone, not a smartphone. Otis placed Callahan's laptop and phone in the gym bag along with all the papers. He opened the drawers of the desk but didn't see any disks or flash drives. Based on the type of phone Callahan used, Otis got the impression that Callahan wasn't a high-tech type. He was sur- prised when he opened one large drawer and found it filled with bottles of booze and a carton of cigarettes. Then all he could do was wait for McCabe to finish with the safe. Fifteen long minutes later, McCabe was done. Fortunately, he hadn't had to use the torch. McCabe pulled two three-foot-long crowbars out of the toolbox and handed one to Quinn, then he and Quinn jacked the safe out of the wall and let it crash to the floor. If there was anyone on the floor below, they definitely would have heard that. The good news was that the safe wasn't that big. It didn't look like it weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds. "See if you can pick it up," Otis said, and McCabe and Quinn easily moved the safe onto the dolly. From the beginning, Otis had planned to leave all the tools and the toolbox, and he'd told McCabe to wipe the tools of prints. All he could do was hope McCabe had done a good job, and if there were any finger-prints, he hoped they were Brown's because he was going to have to leave Brown, too. "Let's get out of here," Otis said. "What are we going to do about Ray?" McCabe said. "What the hell do you think we're going to do?" Otis said. They weren't Marines. They didn't take their dead with them. "Jesus," McCabe said, "his sister is gonna go batshit." That was the same thing Otis had thought, but he'd worry about Brown's crazy sister later. Otis handed Quinn the bag containing the papers and the laptop. McCabe pushed the dolly out of the office with Quinn following. Otis would make one more sweep to make sure he hadn't missed anything. And he'd put a couple of bullets into Callahan's face just to make sure he was dead--and as a little payback for Ray. Callahan was going to have a closed-casket funeral. Excerpted from K Street by M. A. Lawson, M. A. Lawson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
